James Poulos: 2016 a good time for a fresh start

When people get tired, they get confused. In a new poll, administered by Rasmussen, 37 percent of respondents “worried that the United States is developing an unofficial group of royal families with too much influence over government and politics” – but that number is down 10 percent from six years ago.

Meanwhile, America’s national political machine rolls on, doing what it does best: amassing money around hype. No fewer than nine PACs and super-PACs have sprouted up that include Hillary Clinton’s name in their own, according to Alex Seitz-Wald at National Journal. “Some are serious efforts with real money and professional staffs,” he writes. “Others seem well-intentioned, but politically unsophisticated.” For pros and amateurs alike, politics today is straightforward enough: Follow the inevitability.

For ordinary Americans, however, our sense of ourselves is deeply divided on the allegedly inevitable. Some are in denial that they can’t turn back the clock to the Clinton years. Others still haven’t accepted that the Reagan years are over and gone. In the wake of President Obama’s broken vow to transform Washington, we’ve lost confidence in the status quo, but failed to gain confidence in anything new.

On foreign policy, Americans are weary of the “war on terror,” unenthusiastic about a second Cold War and uncertain about what ought to take their places. Voices like that of Daniel Henninger, at the Wall Street Journal, insist that a winning presidential candidate must “explain the high price of America’s fatigue. Fatigue will allow global disorder to displace 60 years of democratic order.” Americans look back at the past decade of democratic order and ask: Is that all there is?

The same cultural and political battles, fought between the same permanently mobilized groups? The same grind of weak job markets and high debt?

The endless churn of globalization, market bubbles and economic crises? The constant demands that America do more with less, from Europe to the Mideast to the Pacific and beyond?

Is that all there is?

If this is inevitability, many Americans want to say, count me out.

The trouble is, we’re just as divided and deeply unsure about what to count ourselves into.

The solution to that paralysis isn’t a bold new program or grandiose vision. It’s not a sales pitch for an enchanted past or a utopian future. Today’s winning electoral slogan offers little more than a real possibility for a fresh start.

Naysayers on the right and the left warn that this attitude will knock the U.S. off its high perch – with enough force to send us all the way to the bottom. Republicans warn that focusing on the present at the expense of past and future will bring soft despotism to our shores and more tyranny overseas. Democrats fear that losing touch with the “arc of history” will lead us to ignore the worst off at home and rely on bombs to solve our problems abroad.

But we are weary, too, of being scolded by “leaders” who think more highly of America than they do Americans. How can we live up to our national promise if our everyday experience feels so often like being boxed in?

We know how Americans respond to the conventional answer. We don’t like being cajoled into choosing one of a handful of Beltway policies. Study after study reveals that millennials feel politically more independent than ever – but in their day-to-day lives feel fated to fit in to a rigged game, at best, and a hostile world, at worst.

That generational malaise is a key to understanding the surprising truth about fatigue. When a real opportunity to start over comes along, people who seem more than ready to roll over and accept “inevitability” find themselves suddenly reanimated. Call it a cultural second wind.

At first, sometimes good symbolism is all it takes – as Barack Obama proved. But if our leaders don’t make good on the symbolism they politicize, they’ll continue to be disappointed as well. They’ll decry an American people too cynical to be inspired, too burdened to move mountains and too stressed out to make heads or tails of what to do instead.

That’s why it’s so important to watch what happens with Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul. Rather than prematurely pushing him to the front of the presidential queue, however, Americans should recognize that he’s the officeholder with the best shot at inspiring a wide variety of movements that can build our collective confidence in creating a fresh start.

It’s the yearning for that confidence that’s behind Paul’s political success to date. It’s what’s behind the standing ovation he received last week at UC Berkeley.

There, Paul said the GOP must “evolve, adapt or die,” analogizing the task before Republicans to the moment Domino’s Pizza “admitted they had bad crust.”

America today is bad crust, and we the people want those in charge to admit it. We don’t just want more bad crust. We don’t even really want those with the most crust to get less. We want a whole new pizza – and by 2016, we might finally be ready to start from scratch.

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